Postmemory - visual essay
The memories we carry, as distorted as they can be are often the only way of retaining the past. The narratives we tell about the past – stories, songs, recipes, maps, diaries, photos – create our reconstruction of it; and shape who we are in the present. The ongoing war in Ukraine has resurfaced the discussion of colonial cultural erasure in eastern Europe, and also brings destruction of culture in very real terms – through destroying city landscapes, monuments, centers, schools, and of course through killing or forcing people to flee. This has also prompted me to reflect upon such things that my relatives have experienced in previous generations, and all the aspects of memories and culture I did not experience because of it, due to destruction of landscapes and family objects, premature deaths or simply due to the nomadic lifestyle my family has had for a short time.
My main approach in visualy exploring the topic has been playing with resenbling the idea of broken,fading, incomplete memory - understood in multiple different ways :
Individual memory fading away; personal histories getting lost as generations of family pass away ,with their lived memory; loss of collective memory – losing what is left behind by archival filtering deciding what is valuable to preserve, display, pass on and show to publicLoss of personal and collective memories stories and identities as a result of cultural violence and erasure
The collages blurred completely are an experiment meant to evoke the feeling of trying to grasp a lost memory. We are left to balance on the verge of comprehension and incomprehension – our brain tries to catch focus on the image without success, the frustration of being able to almost see it, but being unable to reach that, despite it seemig so close.
everything is clear apart from the face – making the situation reconginsable and clear overall, the people in the photo however lose their face – means of identifying them, a unique marquer of personhood, they become abstract people that could be anyone, mannequins
Images in which the people are scratched out, emulate not the organic memory loss related to natural processes and passage of time, these are the ones that suggest and “unnatural” cause to the inablity to grasp the personhoon of people in the image, the people are scratched out, attacked, removed, erased, written over, often an intentionally orchestrated attempts at erasure , a form of cultural violence
For the collages I have used found images from:
Urban media archive in Lviv
The national archives of Estonia
The Finnish museum of photography
